A few months ago I got a review copy of Blogwars, by David D. Perlmutter. Of course I was delighted, and I started to read it at once.
Then I put it down.
Today, facing a serious reading shortage, I picked it up again and made a real effort to get into it. It hadn't improved, but these stupid machines have taught me that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes.
So what's wrong with a book by a highly successful writer and professor of journalism, on the subject of political blogs and their growing impact on American life?
Put briefly, it's a print-on-paper document that needs to be more like web text.
A major design problem
I can't blame Perlmutter for the design of his book, but design is a major problem. The body text appears in a reasonably legible serif font. But the paragraphs are absurdly long, and subheads appear rarely. When they do, they're cramped boldface, barely legible—with underlines.
Now, I've been telling my students since the mid-1990s that you don't underline boldface text. Robin Williams made that simple point in 1995 in The Mac is Not a Typewriter.
Worse yet, the book includes excerpts from blogs using vast swathes of sans serif text, much of it in italics (see pages 144-147 for a really bad example).
You can get away with sans serif in short paragraphs with short lines, but not in lines of 17 to 20 words—not on screen, and not on paper.
Much of Perlmutter's text offers some interesting observations on the effect of political blogging in the 2004 US presidential election. But by failing to exploit the style of effective web text, he effectively muffles himself and undercuts whatever he's trying to say about this medium.
How web text is changing print text
When I started to teach webwriting in the late 1990s, I tried to draw a distinction between the habits of print readers and those of online readers. As one who started reading print on paper in 1947, I'm very habituated to it indeed.
But Perlmutter's book has taught me that the web is actually changing all our reading habits. Short, concise web text, well laid out, has an impact we don't get over. When we go back to print on paper, we're too impatient to put up with long sentences and long paragraphs.
Some of my favourite political bloggers, like Glenn Greenwald, still haven't learned that. His posts are long, with endless paragraphs and tedious patches of italic quotations.
A blog like Power Line, whose politics I find regrettable, at least presents itself in short, well-designed paragraphs. (But Power Line should keep its text columns narrower, and use a serif font for body text.)
Greenwald is influential despite his print-oriented text. But he'd more influential if he turned his long-winded paragraphs into short, punchy statements.
Power Line doesn't persuade me, but at least I get its point in a hurry. And I recognize that its authors are trying to make their text readable.
I hope David Perlmutter does a new edition of Blogwars, preferably in time for the fall election. But I hope he gets an editor and a designer who know how to create a print analog of a website, so his readers will understand what he's trying to tell us.
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